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Thursday, April 30, 2009

The Ulduar Raiding Gear List: Part 1

Update: This post now includes all of the Ulduar Gear available as of 7/10/09. These rankings are based upon a pre3.2 Lunar rotation. It requires a lot of data entry to create these posts so I am sure there are some errors involved. Please let me know if I have an incorrect link or a valuation seems wrong.

A few comments:1. This post and the next one are designed after Kalon's Bear gear lists (1 , 2) over at Think Tank. I liked his format so I've stolen it.

2. These rankings are purely based upon DPS. Yes, Stam and Mp5 have value, but there is no way to directly translate them into DPS. By the same token Intelligence and Spirit have both mana and DPS benefits, but only the DPS is considered.

3. Finally, I absolutely DO NOT recommend you trying to get evey #1 item on this list. If you did you would have over 17% hit from gear alone. This list should be used to see how the different pieces relate to each other. Is there a comparable item? Which is the best slot to break the tier set? The items I would pick for my personal set are marked with an (*). Picking up these items will put you at or just over the Hit Cap an provide you with a good combination of DPS stats.

4. T7 Set Bonuses: The 2T7 is ignored because it's impact is minimal at best. The 4T7 is valued as if it was 229.5 / 4 Crit rating.

5. T8 Set Bonuses: First of all, there is currently a bug where your current SF cast will consume a 4T8 proc if it procs while you are casting. I am assuming that that is not intentional and that blizzard will fix it. My analysis shows that the 4T8 set bonus will be worth about 293 DPS if this issue is fixed. Also, my analysis shows that 2T8 and 4T7 are very similar in value, but that is in a perfect environment. Therefore I am valuing 2T8 as if it was 4T7 but devaluing it by 30% to account for wasted eclipse procs. Therefore the the T8 set peices gain an extra 82 points in the third column rating.

6. DO NOT use column three as a reason to use all 5 Tier pieces. It shows you why you should use at least four, but after those four use column one and two to evaluate gear choices.

Assumptions:1. I've chosen a very high gear level for this analysis. My hypothetical moonkin for this post has 2900 Spell Power, 41% Crit chance, 29.4% haste (16.2% from gear), and a 99.96% chance to hit. This maximizes the value of Crit Rating and Haste Rating, but Minimizes the value of Spell Power and Hit Rating. The main reason I did this is because if you follow the list your stats will be similar to these.

2. To rank the items I've used the values generated by my stats model that you can find here.

I go with the Leggings of the Enslaved Idol here, because the stats are awesome. However, my guess is that most people will pick up the Conqueror's Nightsong Trousers first and then pickup the LotEI when they havea full set of T8 and are working on Hard Modes.

The Collar of the Wyrmhunter is a better helm by itself but Conqueror's Nightsong Cover wins out because of its set bonuses. If you can pick up the CotW on the cheap I would recommend it so that you can use it until the 4T8 set bonus is fixed.

Some of you may be asking "How can you pick Conqueror's Nightsong Mantle as BiS when it is so far down the list?" Well, five of the items ranked above it are only there because they have Hit Rating. Another two are just bearly above it. So, the T8.25 shoulders aren't as bad as this list makes them look. When you include the Set bonuses as a part of there value they quickly jump to the top.

The Grasps of Reason are great and will get even better once we know the socket bonus. However, the wrist slot is a greate place to pick up a small amount of hit if you need it. As our gear improves most of our hit items will have a very large amount of hit. Therefore an item with just a little hit may be desireable to pick up those last 20-30 points you need. Finally, if your guild is still running Sarth 2D or better you may want to pick up the Unsullied Cuffs.

The Treads are still an very good item but the Boods of Fiery Resolution benfit from having a large amount of Haste and the new and improved Spirit. However, I wouldn't be suprised if the Treads became my first choice again after more is known about what a BiS moonkin looks like at the end of Ulduar.

Notes:Ok, that is all of the primary armor evaluated. My next post will be out early next week and list all of the Jewelry and weapons.

Once again, as you can see there are a lot of links and values in this post. It is quite possible that I messed some of them up. If you find an incorrect link or a valuation just doesn't look right, please let me know so that I can correct it.

It looked like that earlier for me as well, but I'm also using FF. So maybe it was just an FF problem. At any rate, the site looks normal now. :)

As always, awesome job with this list. Looking forward to the next part(s). I've had my eye on the Wanton Spellcaster legs for a while, but I've yet to see them drop, let alone win them. I'm not very hopeful that I'll see them before 3.1. T_T

Nice List. Although it really is frustrating that I have the second best item in almost all of my slots. I have extremly bad luck with drops. It ttok me 4 month of doing 10 man Malygos to finally get the footprints. In the 5 month I do Sartharion 25 Illustration only dropped once and I can't seem to get a decent 213 ilvl belt from naxx :-(.

I love moonkin form as I am norm the only one. I have low hit but my haste is maxxed, I havnt been the Maly yet as I have not completed naxx. I have learned much from your site as to better my rotations but find that when I adjust talents differently everthing changes. I like to have the elips as it hits 11k every 2.81 sec. I currenly do aprox 3k dps in 25 man naxx but want to hit over 4k.(I hit 14k in araknid, aoe blast) what is your dps with your gear in 25 man naxx? -Gargen of Vek'Nilash (feel free to imdb and send comments pjoutlaw11@hotmail.com)

My main spec since I hit 80 has been resto, but I loved balance while I was leveling and plan on using it for my second spec once the servers go live today. I just had a quick question about hit rating as it applies to my situation.

I've got a pretty good set of resto gear - mostly Naxx-25 epics at this point. I've got good spell power, and decent haste/crit, but basically no +hit. I could equip some old blues of offspec gear that has some +hit on it, but I would almost always be giving up spell power and/or other stats to do so.

So how important is it to be hit capped if it means giving up spell power to do it? If I value hit as around 1.2 spell power (a number I think I got from an old post on your blog), I'll end up with almost no +hit at all, which feels wrong after all I've heard about the importance of getting to the soft hit cap.

Could you post the actual stat values you used to create this gear list? I use the Pawn addon for gear comparisons, but I have yet to find a good scale for moonkin stats - especially one that takes into account the 3.1 changes. Thanks!

Managing Hit can be difficult. The best advice I can give is plan ahead. There are two ways I plan ahead. First, I try and know what I want before it drops. Second, After I'm at the hit cap I try and pick up good hit items that no one else wants but could be usefull in the future. That way if my gear changes I may be able to sub some of these peices in to make up the drop in hit. Basicly I have a lot of hit gear in my bags.

I didn't include any PvP gear in here because as a general rule PvE gear > PvP gear.

@Phil

I was generally hitting 5K DPS on Patchwerk.

@Dean

Getting to the hit cap is very important If you plan on raiding as a moonkin. If your just talking about farming or 5mans your Resto gear is fine. For this guide I valued Hit rating at about 1.48 spell power, but that is at a pre-3.1 BiS gear level. If you plan on raiding as a moonkin I suggest getting the Emblem Off-Hand, Hit trinket out of H VH, and a couple of the tier peices with Hit on it. This will get you fairly close to the cap without killing your Spell Power.

I do have a question for you, When you calculated the T8 2pc set bonus, what kind of up time did you give it?

I've noticed alot of sites, such as Elitist Jerks have been calculating the bonus out at about 40-45% which is actually a rather unrealistic uptime unless you are standing still and get VERY efficient eclipse procs. I'm estimating the uptime would be somewhere closer to the 25% range on average fights. This number could easily drop even lower in heavy movement or bad rng.

It seems that under these circumstances, keeping our current 4pc t7 setup plus the #1 legs may be our highest dps throughput set, rather than using your 2pc t8 choices along with the other BiS choices you have for the 3 non tiered slots

1597.3 for 4pc t7 + Enslaved Idolvs1643.5 for 2pc t8 + your BiS

If you weight the 2pc t8 bonus even 30% less (giving it a 28% uptime if your calc was 40% uptime which is probably going to be the average) your BiS value would drop down to 1589.2

Not to mention the fact that eclipse will proc less by losing all that crit from the 4pc t7, I really really doubt this is an upgrade. How do you feel?

I realize hit is very highly valued when you are below the hit cap, but at the same time it's absolutely worthless beyond this cap. With the massive amounts of hit on Ulduar gear it's terribly easy to remain hit capped. I personally feel valuing hit higher than spell power artificially inflates all hit heavy gear and makes it look better than it really is.

And I know intellect only gives us 12% into spellpower with talents, making its value worth .125 (the .oo5 is crit you get from intellect). Is there a reason you feel it is worth more than this? As long as we aren't doing a bunch of aoe and have proper regen composition, mana is not really an issue.

You make a good point that Eclipse will be devalued in a high movement fight and therefore the 2T8 bonus will be devalued also.

However, you also make several very large leaps in logic that are very unrealistic.

1. First you devalue 2T8 by 30% to 40%. That may be true for a particular fight or a particular phase of a fight, but I highly doubt it is true a cross the board. Ulduar is definately more moble then naxx was but there are several fights that aren't that moble or where you can be stationary for long streaches.

2. How did you come up with 1597.3 vs 1643.5? I can get the T8 number but your T7 number is way high. If I add the values from my list for 4 pieces of T7 and the Enslaved Idol, I get 1401.35.

I think your devaluing the stat increase you get from the Ulduar gear.

3. Lossing the 4T7 set bonus doesn't reduce your Eclipse uptime as much as you may think. First off other gear up grades will make up for some of the crit lost. Second, your crit rate has very little to do with when your Eclipse will proc. The cooldown has a much bigger impact.

4. Yes, hit is so highly valued that it can move some items to the top. However, I clearly state in the beginning of Part one readers shouldn't pick up the number 1 item on each of the lists just for that reason.

This is a mathimatical ranking and there isn't a better way to rate Hit. To compensate I have provided multiple ratings so that people can make the best choice based on there situation. That is why I have the total stat rating, The stat rating with out hit, the stat rating with set bonuses, and the stat rating with set bonuses but without hit.

5. Finally, where did you come up with your 0.125 value for int? The 0.12 value is clear, but it looks like you pulled the 0.005 out of the air.

I didn't pull any of my numbers out of the are. They are all determed through modeling. Here is how my number was calculated.

160 Int gives you a 1% chance to crit.45.9 Crit Rating also gives you a 1% chance to crit. Crit rating is worth 0.80 SP according to my modeling.

45.9/160 = 0.2869. So each Int is equivalent to 0.2869 Crit rating.

0.2869 * 0.8 = 0.2295

Due to Lunar Guidence int is converted to SP at a rate of 12% so the value of Int in terms of SP is 0.2295 + 0.12 = 0.3495.

Eclipse is 15 secs up 15 seconds down4 wraths @ 1.25 seconds to proc eclipse = 35 seconds per cycle = %42 uptime you will typically lose another 3% waiting for your next cast to finish (about 1 second). 39% uptime, throw in some movement and you can easily drop to 30% or 35% (not to mention some extra wrath casts to proc it.... 4 is still being nice IMO)

3) I do agree, but it still will affect it.4) Again, props to your calcs and blog, I love em :-)5) I messed up and calculated it as 1 crit rating per 166 int instead of 1% chance to crit... ty for the clarification there.

The Sash of Ancient Power is incredibly well itemized. A 32sp gem in the blue socket is well worth it and is significantly better than the other crafted option you choose as your BiS choice.

As far as hit rating goes and general gearing philosophy, I think the goal of any moonkin trying to go from T7 BIS to T8 BIS should be to get to a crit level that solar eclipse is more powerful than lunar eclipse, and to attain enough hit rating from other gear to not have to wear the Dying Curse or Elemental Focus Stone and use two stacking spellpower trinkets.

In combination, the Illustration of the Dragon Soul and the Eye of the Broodmother will be extremely potent and I'm sure will have a higher actual DPS output than the Flare of the Heavens. Keep in mind that whenever you get into a stand and cast situation the trinkets will start stacking simultaneously.

If you get to 10 stacks of dragon soul with broodmother equipped that is equal to 325 static spellpower and 87 crit rating. There are a number of mobile fights in Ulduar, but with good use of insect swarm and moonfire a mobile moonkin should be able to maintain the trinket stacks on pretty much every fight except mimiron which has long pauses between the phases and Vezax where you must often not cast.

I also was kinda wondering about the trinket choice. I really find myself wanting the Scale of Fates trinket, and I already had the Sash of Ancient power made for myself (it put me over hit cap because I'm one of the nubs that use Dying Curse).

I've never been a fan of trinkets that do additional damage on proc effects, so even if it does turn out to be a BIS I probably won't end up taking it except for a higher WoW Heroes ranking :P

Great stuff! How about an extra colum stating which raid it comes from (Uld10/25, Naxx10/25, Etc.) and which boss. I know it's simple for us to simply click on the Wowhead link but it would make it a nice one stop shop. Thanks for your blog btw, as a new member of the Moonkin community it's been invaluable. Cheers.

Two quick things. 1) The priest only thing for the shoulders is probably *not* a bug and won't be fixed. Why you ask? Because: 2) You forgot to list the excellent Druid only chest off hardmode Vezax. I forget it's name but it has 3 sockets with a SP socket bonus, high Sp, Haste, and lots of int and spirit. I think it's a candidate for BiS if you do not need the tier piece for the bonus.